"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis

25.9.09

CRITIQUES OF POSTMODERN CONSERVATISM, AN ONGOING SERIES: In response to James Poulos' "Glenn Beck is Not a Postmodern Conservative," a commenter writes:

Your blog is aptly named Postmodern Conservative, which describes approaches that are methodological & practical but not ideological like either postmodernISM or conservatISM. A pomocon, in my view, applies such tools as subsidiarity & tradition as proper biases, not absolutes. S/he employs a contrite fallibilism in response to the postmodern critique but remains metaphysically and morally a realist, not sawing off the epistemological branches where one’s ontological eggs are nested.

This sounds a lot like... modern political theory and philosophy. Seriously: there's a little bit of Burke (proper biases), Hume (who goes and plays billiards when his epistemological speculations get too much), Locke (fallibilism, of a kind) and Kant (retaining moral and (perhaps) metaphysical realism, depending on what you mean by 'realism') in there. But the dread specter of Enlightenment is such that one pretends a new response to the postmodern critique, or else engages in some dubious time-shifting (Burke, never mind when he actually wrote, is actually 'postmodern' in his response to the French Revolution).